August 30, 2010

Mazzone on Bifurcating Legal Education

A different approach is for universities to have both a professional law school and an academic law department.

Under this approach, the professional school would be staffed by instructors whose job is to teach legal skills to lawyers-in-training. Instructors would not be expected to write books or articles. Instead, they would bring expertise in teaching practical skills.

And:

The academic law department would be very different from the professional school. It would be staffed by tenured and tenure-track professors. The principle task of these professors would be research and writing. Like faculty members in other departments,

Read the whole post. Both the strengths and weaknesses of the contemporary legal academy in the United States are (in large part) a function of its institutional structure. The professional school model is based on the assumption that the training of a learned profession can marry elements of a souped up trade school with serious academic study of law. Had law remained an undergraduate program, the legal academy would have evolved differently. For example, it seems likely that a PhD (or equivalent) in law would have become the qualification for legal academics. And the content of coursework in the PhD program would gradually have diverged from the undergraduate curriculum--as it has in other disciplines (Political Science, for example).